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Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:35:18 +0200
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Subject: simplexml inconsistencies in the last few releases (the same issue
 already discussed)
From: christian.stocker@liip.ch (Christian Stocker)

Hi

It's about the two tests in

http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/ext/simplexml/tests/008.phpt
and
http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/ext/simplexml/tests/bug48601.phpt

which contractited themself and we had back and forth commits due to this.

So we had the following history

5.3.0 old behaviour
...
5.3.3 new behaviour
...
5.3.7 old behaviour
...
5.4.0 new behaviour


The main question now is, should we introduce back the new behavior in
the 5.3 line? Since the new behaviour was already there since more than
a year, but now isn't, i'm not sure, what to do.

The good point about the new behaviour is that it's almost BC, so going
from the old to the new shouldn't cause much problems, but vice versa it
does. The reason is that if you do an valid xpath query which returns
zero results, the old behaviour returned false, the new one returns an
empty array, so before 5.3.3 you had to write

***
$res = $sx->query("/some/xpath");

if ($res) {
   foreach($res as $node) {}
}
***

Which still will work with the new behaviour, but that "if" is not
really needed with the new behaviour, so going back to the old one may
break if nothing is found (there may be problems when you asked for
"zero-results" with checking if $res is false)

Anyway, I'd appreciate some opinions about introducing back the new
beehaviour in 5.3 or not (I guess 5.3.8 wasn't the last 5.3 release :))

chregu


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